Medical Department #45 - Sleep, Specimens, and Sepsis

Until the April 2013 issue, this column had taken a bit of a “sabbatical,” but I still had my eye on interesting reports about the Civil War in the medical and scientific literature. I share some of the highlights below.

In one study – “Sleepless Vigilance: ‘Stonewall’ Jackson and the Duty Hours Controversy" - published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences (December 14, 2011), the authors examined "the effect of sleep deprivation on Jackson's battle decisions in light of experimental data.” The report adds a historical perspective to the modern study of the effects of sleep deprivation in the modern military (as well as debates over limiting the duty hours of physicians and other professionals).

Drawing on a variety of material - “myriad letters and reports and…eyewitness writings of numerous intimate associates” – the authors describe Jackson's sleep habits, his famous "night marches," and offer an interesting statistical analysis of the quality of Jackson's command decisions in battle based on his "sleep opportunities" prior to the engagements.

They conclude (with due caution) that Jackson's poor decisions resulted from sleep deprivation which mirrors modern scientific medical studies which show that lack of sleep is associated with "decreased vigilance, deterioration in mood states, difficulty in concentrating and impaired learning and memory."

The few items – only a handful of the more than 2,000 Civil War-related items in the museum’s collection – are special because they are “from soldiers who the poet and essayist Walt Whitman nursed in the wartime hospitals of Washington, DC.” They include the thigh bones of soldiers from Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania infantry regiments who were wounded in battles in Virginia between 1862 and 1865.

The authors unite photographs of the specimens; details of the soldiers’ wounding, treatment, and death; and the words of Walt Whitman specific to these very soldiers, as published in Specimen Days and other works, such as this lament to his mother:

“I have just left Oscar Cunningham, the Ohio boy—he is in a dying condition—there is no hope for him—it would draw tears from the hardest heart to look at him—his is all wasted away to a skeleton, & looks like someone fifty years old.”

The authors justly conclude that “uniting these remains with Whitman’s words yields a new interpretation that bears witness to individual histories during a time of unprecedented conflict in American history.” Readers can see the entire report with illustrations here.

Disease and infection killed more soldiers during the Civil War than battlefield deaths. It’s true that the groundbreaking finings of Pasteur and Lister on microbes and their connection to surgical infection were not published until after the war, but the companion conventional wisdom that wartime surgeons were empirically ignorant of infection, or numb to methods or attempts to combat wound infection, is not true.

The article includes a description of hospital gangrene; attempts to combat the infection via debridement, poultices, topical solutions, and other methods; a biography of Goldsmith; and an excellent description of his wartime experiments with bromine. One of the most interesting aspects of the work was an independent six-month clinical study conducted by another surgeon at Goldsmith’s invitation. The work culminated in the publication of A Report on Hospital Gangrene, Erysipelas and Pyaemia (1863).

There were many others, but these reports serve as evidence that there is always room for interesting retrospective analyses and biographies of people, places, and concepts related to Civil War medicine.

I’ve already got some great interviews lined up for columns in the coming months on drunkenness in the army, slave medicine, artificial limbs, and more. So stay tuned!

2 comments:

I will definitely need to share this theory about Stonewall Jackson with my husband and two sons. A few years ago, we went on a Stonewall tour, tracing his movements as he entered his final battle. We were shown the specific area of the woods where he was believed to have been shot, then we drove along his ambulance route, stopping at the farmhouse where his arm was buried (and, yes; there were lemons left there). We then went to Guinea Station to see where he died and then to Lexington, to see his home and his tomb.

Thanks Kelly for the great comment! My best friend and I also made a long weekend trip to Fredericksburg and saw all the local battlefields and the Stonewall Jackson sites. I haven;t been to Lexington yet though. You might also enjoy another post of mine about Stonewall Jackson here:

About Jim Schmidt

I am a chemist by training and profession and currently work at a biotech company near Houston, TX.
I have always been interested in history, and have been especially interested in the Civil War for the past 15-plus years.
My interests are wide-ranging and include Civil War medicine, patent/quack medicines, 19th-century Spiritualism, slavery and abolitionists, and much more.
I have been writing historical pieces for magazines and newspapers for about 15 years. My work has been published in *North & South*, *The Artilleryman*, *Learning Through History*, *World War II*, *Chemical Heritage*, and *Today's Chemist* magazines. My column, "Medical Department," has appeared regularly in *Civil War News* since September 2000.
I am the author, editor, or contributor to five books on the Civil War, including "Lincoln's Labels" (2008), "Years of Change and Suffering:Modern Perspectives on Civil War Medicine" (2009), "Notre Dame and the Civil War (2010), "Galveston and the Civil War (2012), and a chapter in "Civil War America: A Social and Cultural History" (2012)

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